Ink

I so wanna write. You know, on paper, with pen. After over three months of barely having written anything (because when I moved to the States, I brought my beloved ink pens but didn’t get ink for fearing of it spilling and ruining everything in my suitcase), I am craving to hold a beautiful pen with a balled nib which flows across paper to make beautiful words appear.
The craving is so heightened that unknowingly, I have resorted to my father’s habit of moving my fingers in the air or on my husband’s arm or chest hair to imitate writing gestures.

And this being the famed United States of A.m.e.r.i.c.a., every time I mentioned ink or ink pens to anyone, they looked at me and said (with a pronounced nasal twang and drawl), ‘You mean those things they used back in the Dark Ages!’

Disappointed as I was, I couldn’t help pondering a dismal life without ink in my lovely ink pens. At every infrequent juncture in life, when I needed to write, I avoided it. For it is blasphemous to write with the lowly ball pen, scratching smidgens of fiber away and leaving irregular smears of unsightly viscous ink on the paper.
Like every other time, I could not resist the impulse of browsing through a stationery shop when I saw one yesterday. It was our first visit to Santana Row, a posh strip mall about six miles from our house. On any other day, we would have had to think ten times before venturing there, because public transport sucks in Silicon Valley, and all we had was two bikes to go anywhere.

Mind you, despite our relative mobility handicap, and the freezing chill we were subjected to every evening, we managed to scout around and explore more places than a lot of people do despite having loved here forever. Lol…oh yeah, funny people who barely know their own locality while they’ve been to LA n LV n back ten times over!

But we bought a car (yay, hip hip hurray, somersaults of glee) a couple of days ago and are not at the mercy of the awful Valley Transport Authority (VTA), the public transport of Silicon Valley. So we drove to Santana Row for the first time. It was chilly and just a little wow to walk under the magnified lettering of the world’s most expensive brands decked up uber-couture style, gleaming in all their glory, embossed on silky smooth reflecting wall surfaces.
And there was a pomp little stationery shop, not a famous brand, nor did it have gold lettering, but there was Chinese origami in bright hues of red and green placed delicately in the window (and there was also a beautiful (and beautifully cleavaged) woman at the reception kiosk of whom I care not enough to mention but in parenthesis).

I walked in, browsing around, admiring the wonderful touch of paper and the colors floating around from them. Everything was obscenely priced and I was just about to stroll right out when my husband (oh yeah, he was with me. Did I not mention it?) suggested I ask whether they have ink in stock.
‘Yeah right! That woman will look at me like I’ve stepped out of the Jane Eyre she read back in high school,’ I said.

But he insisted and I turned towards the woman with a fatality in my tone, and I was not surprised when she answered my question with a completely quizzical look.

‘What do you mean, ‘ink’? What’s ink pens? Do you mean like, like…’

But I had already given up. “Forget it,’ I said and began to walk out feeling completely antiquated, when she sprang me a surprise.

‘Do you mean fountain pens?’

‘Yes, yes, yes, that is what I mean (sigh),’ I raised my eyebrows in fascination at this American wow-cleavaged woman who knew what fountain pens were!! Hallelujah…

She walked up to a counter with fountain pens displayed on black satin, priced at a thirty percent discount. Apparently no one was interested in those piece de art without a hefty discount. Or perhaps, the original prices, obscenely pitched at $250 and above was the deterrent.

She knelt under the counter and fumbled for so long that I hissed to my husband with clenched teeth, ‘She was just kidding about knowing what ink is, wasn’t she?’

After what seemed like five minutes and was definitely not less than four, she stood up, pushed a swaying strand of curly blond hair away from her face, jiggled her melons into place within her super-push-ups and handed us a tiny bottle of ink.

Voila…I was so overjoyed at finding the mythic fluid in this land of Milk and Money, and for this angelic woman to have found it for me, that I forgave her her beautiful boobs and half-forgave my hubby for having eyeballed her all along.

So now I have my precious ink, and it does write smoothly, glides along the paper without scratching it…I checked it at the shop.

Then why, oh why, do I find myself typing away comfortably at my laptop when all I have been dreaming of is letting my fingers swoosh the ink across some paper. Why am I talking about it on a blog when I could have returned to my beloved, old-fashioned diary?

Oh, the pain of flitting loves…from paper to laptop!